It seems that, unlke oil or coal, the total number of major disasters is way lower on the nuke side.
Of course, the "way lower" number of nuclear plants may have something to do with that. But on you also have to consider the lack of evacuations around a coal plant in the event of disasters - and I don't know of a single coal plant that has a sarcophagus over it, or a vast area around it where people are forbidden to live.
Universities built us a huge, world spanning network and we loved what we saw. We went and built ourselves a cute garden, where we made our claims and planted wonderful flowers and trees to enjoy, no need for fences or barbed wire because, hey, we WANTED to invite each other over to have a look at what we did with our little turf on the 'net.
And that's where your fantasy diverges from reality - and you don't even realize it. They built that network for *their* purposes, not yours. You forgot that the ground you planted the gardens on wasn't yours in the first place.
Nah it's really just a dud, and worse yet a dud that directly copies XKCD's style without any of his insight or creativity. Dedoimedo is pretty much ready for Hollywood - he's got their modus operandi down cold.
What are you going to do with that molten mess? Remember; it's basically all radioactive waste now, good luck finding a country that will take it. Nope, that witches brew of toxic heavy metals is staying there for a long, long time.
Why would it have to stay there? Does not Japan have waste storage facilities? It's not like the mass cannot be physically removed - they had the same thing at TMI, and though it took a while it was all removed.
And there is the other minor detail that perhaps we might reconsider our bigger is better fixation? Not everything scales up gracefully
But nuclear power plants aren't one of those things - every bit of experience we have to date indicates that they want to be big because it makes so many things easier.
I suspect that the cost and complexity of a nuclear plant large enough to power the planet probably hides some brittleness that will come back to haunt us
One of the harsh lessons the US Navy learned in the 50's with their attempts to build small nuclear power plants for destroyers and smaller submarines is that the cost and complexity of the reactor scale very weakly (read almost not at all) with the size of the plant. That's why, for the past forty-odd years, seaborne nuclear power has been confined to submarines (where the performance advantage is worth the cost), aircraft carriers (ditto), and cruisers (because it was mandated by Congress).
Problem with big is that everything connected with it is expensive and difficult to change -- maybe this is another example?
The problem with any precision engineering is that's it's expensive and difficult to change. Size is utterly irrelevant.
The biggest problem with these plants are not equipment so much as personnel. For example, the one accident that everyone thinks of is 3 mile island. Even with their large amount of equipment failures it wasn't the equipment failure alone that cause the incident. It was those running the plant violating one of the primary rules of being an equipment operator 'always believe your indications'.
That's the problem - they *did* believe their indications... Most notably the ones that said the PORV was shut (it wasn't) and the secondary coolant pumps were running (they were, but they were isolated preventing the coolant from reaching the reactor).
They saw the high temp alarms of the primary relief valves go into alarm state and ass-u-med it was just a bogus faulty alarm.
Actually, they *missed* the one indicating high temperature in the primary relief circuit.
That was the whole reason the accident got so bad - the indications they saw (PORV, secondary coolant pumps) lead them to believe that core water level (which they had no way of measuring) should be going up and the core temperature going down. They couldn't understand why then that the core temperature continued to go up. It wasn't until the next shift arrived and noticed the high temps in the primary relief circuit that the backup to the PORV was shut and water levels and flow through the core was restored. (But by then, it was hours too late. The damage to the core was already done.)
Thirdly, as a country we need to take a honest look at our existing nuclear plants. They're old. We've made HUGE advancements in nuclear power (just look at any reactor on a navy vessel)
Actually, now that the S5W is out of service, the vast majority of reactors in Naval Service is the S6G - whose basic design dates from the late 60's/early 70's. Right behind them is the A4W - whose design also dates from the late 60's/early 70's.
Not to mention that naval nuclear propulsion plants aren't really related to shore electrical generating plants. Sure, they're both nuclear reactors - but the differ greatly in concept and detail.
The problem with nuclear reactors is that when things go wrong, it goes wrong in a way that's very hard to control and can have an enormous impact on the health of entire generations.
Sensationalist horsecrap. Things routinely go wrong with nuclear power plants, and unless you actually follow the NRC bulletins - you'll never know about it because it posed zero risk to anyone.
Something this dangerous should not be in the hands of profit making corporations...the budgets are always set so the profit margin is there.
No offense, but you're delusional. Budgets are set based on the rates approved by the utilities commissions - which aren't going to go up just because the plant is operated by a not-for-profit or a public utility.
Good designs should last longer than 30 years. Most classic power plants have run for over a 100 years with the right upgrades.
Sure, if you define the "right upgrades" as "replacing damn near every component in the system including the boilers, turbines, and generators". Otherwise, not so much. (You're also likely suffering from survivor bias.)
Then why do you and the grandparent insist on treating them as such? If they aren't political activists (or more correctly, terrorists in the normal sense of the word), then they're criminals.
Reality isn't about excuses and justifications.
Then why do you go to such lengths to provide excuses and justifications? As above, you're saying one thing and then blithely saying another without the foggiest clue as your inconsistency.
If we actually push hard enough on piracy, then the problem will just pop up somewhere else.
Yet another inconsistency due to utter cluelessness.
In the first place, pirates arise independently where piracy is profitable. Stopping piracy off of Somalia won't make a bunch of fisherman off of Chile (grabbing a country at random) suddenly go "yo! let's all be pirates". In the second place, history has shown again and again that when you make piracy unprofitable and dangerous - it stops.
There's no option to protect Somalian fisheries from the foreign trawlers that have taken advantage of the lack of government. There's no option to investigate foreign vessels dumping toxic materials in Somali waters.
And unless you've bought into the pirate's propaganda hook, line, and sinker - there doesn't need to be.
Seriously, people interested in taking matters into their own hands and establishing law and order form police forces and coast guards. People interested in taking advantage of the lack of law and order prey on innocents. They sail hundreds and sometimes thousands of miles to take hostages and demand ransoms without speaking a word about fisheries or toxic waste.
Overall Mr Buxton is really, really bad at evaluating the success or failure and the usefulness or not of many of the items he has in his collection.
Perhaps, but my impression is he's not collecting them because they were successful or failures per se. He's collecting them because they're interesting.
Then why did he label so many of them as successes or failures, giving specific reasons why?
I think the submitter needs to understand what "failed" means.
He's mostly using "failed" in the conventional marketdroid sense - they didn't fly off the shelves making the corporation manufacturing them and those investing in them buckets of cash.
A lot of that stuff were far from failures. they were designed for a specific task. the 3d mousing devices are STILL used to this day in high end 3d CAD.
That's true of many of the items in the collection.
He labels the overblown Swiss Army Knife as a bad design - while failing to consider the purpose of the design. (As a collectible/art piece, which he tacitly admits it was a success at.) The next knife down he's equally dismissive of. But he fails to consider that a) there are other methods of carrying (a belt pouch for example), or b) that there *are* people who constantly have something it will fit into handy (a photographer and his camera bag, a fisherman and his tackle box, etc..). The lowest knife, which he praises, has so little functionality it's only real use is to be impressive to the guy in the next cubicle over because you're the Guy Who Always Has A Knife.
The same with the Nikon Coolpix 100. He seems utterly unaware that there are a huge number of cameras out there... My little Canon A1200 has no extra chargers or cables either.
He praises the Olympic Memory Stick Thumb Drive - but take away the 'cool' packaging, and it's just another thumb drive. Maybe he keeps the 'cool' packaging as an art piece on his desk, but I suspect he's one of the few.
Overall Mr Buxton is really, really bad at evaluating the success or failure and the usefulness or not of many of the items he has in his collection.
In the second half of the 19th century the US took rail transit very seriously. The standardization of the gauge isn't the only example of this. The US also spent a large amount of effort building the transcontinental railroad. A major reason for the success of the United States in the 20th century was the massive investment in infrastructure in the end of the 19th.
The vast majority of the rail in the country was paid for by private investment, not public. Also, the vast majority of public and private investment in infrastructure occurred in the 20th century, not the 19th.
But photography? First of all, that's not really something that's usually based upon a set price. That's something that should be a negotiated price on a per-contract basis.
You've got it quite backwards. Photography is virtually always based on a set price for a package or per item on a menu of choices.
It's not a high margin business, and every hour spent negotiating is an hour spent accumulating costs and not making money.
I mean -- It's not like theres ever been another dominant life form that's now utterly extinct due to one or two slightly above average asteroids striking the Earth -- You can be complacent because you're ancestors were not dinosaurs..
I'm not complacent - but I'm also not ignorant. Going into space today to escape a dinosaur killer is like walking into an auto body shop to buy a pizza. It's not only pointless, it's stupidly silly - because it's going to be centuries at best before anything off planet has sufficient infrastructure, population, and capital to survive the loss of Earth.
The real question is why you don't have enough imagination to figure out reasons why we might want to go up there.
No, the real question is why buzzword filled drivel like yours gets modded insightful. The OP made a valid point - which you failed to address at all.
Jingoism is no substitute to actual thought.
The opportunities always seem obvious in hindsight, but it takes a pioneering spirit to seek new ones out and make them real.
Hogwash. LEO is a physical place just like Manhattan or Des Moines. We know to a fair degree what physically can or cannot be done there - and how much it costs to get there to do what can be done. The calculations to determine if money can be made from those activities, given the known inputs, are something any first year accounting student can do.
Yet despite all the years the input data has been done, and all the years a lot of people have been thinking about the data... the best we've got is blind jingoism. To any rational person that indicates that there is Problem with a capital 'P'.
I remember drawing on it and thinking: "The generation that comes after me will be like gods of technology. They'll have been born with this in their hands and it will bring them to new levels of intelligence, tech and opportunity."
This is just not the case now 25+yrs later. I work a great deal with teens teaching them tech from an art and theater end. What I find is that they know how to use the front end with incredible alacrity and skill. However once that tech has a glitch or fails them they're dumb founded. Yes, I am generalizing, but I've found an overwhelming majority lack even the basic sense to trouble shoot.
The sad part is that you actually actually seem to believe anything has changed. The worse part is that there is enough equally deluded moderators to get drivel like yours rated 'insightful'.
Nothing has changed, you're just you've failed to realize the difference between your fantasies and assumptions and reality.
While the complexity of the tech has grown since my first introduction, with an almost perfect inverse the ignorance of that same tech's fundamental workings has grown.
The reality is - it's always been this way. When I was in high school, thirty years ago, cars were a mature technology and most of them could be worked on by practically anyone with a modicum of sense and reasonable eye-hand coordination. Yet very few people did their own work on their own cars. The same goes for practically any piece of technology you care to mention - from as simple as the hot water heater in your dwelling to something as complex as a computer. Most people simply don't care to learn enough to fix/maintain them. They either pay someone else to do the work, or just pay to replace the item. (Depending on the relative costs and the value of the item.)
Space (and travel in it) should really only be regulated by its inhabitants.
That's a very noble slogan - but utterly disconnected from reality. These rules are designed to regulate the craft that will fly over existing populated areas, in the atmosphere - *not* in space. I.E. they represent a danger to bystanders in the same way aircraft do.
For people in another place to impose rules on it sounds a lot like an imperial power imposing its laws on a colony - and we all know how well that works.
Historically speaking? It works pretty damm well. Far more colonies were peacefully let go or pulled from the sphere of one country to that of another by violence or it's threat than freed themselves with out without the aid of others. And when we're talking about 'colonies' that for the foreseeable future will be utterly and completely dependent on those imposing the rules...
Even if he wasn't actively commanding - that doesn't mean he wasn't consulting and guiding or being kept in the loop. The courier that turned out to be the key to locating bin Laden almost certainly had to be carrying something worth bin Laden taking the risk of maintaining a communications link considering the measures he took to sever other links.
People tend to trust news sources, and in the past they were at least somewhat reputable and made some effort to check the facts.
You're remembering a golden era that never existed. Newspapers have always been biased. Back when all but the smallest towns had more than one paper, you'd have a Democratic paper, a Republican paper, a Reformist paper, etc... etc... (Substitute political parties of your own country to get localized results.)
The Ogle Earth blog has the best coverage I've seen so far - deducing the location from various clues. Finding it turns out to be a medium difficult problem because of the age of the imagery.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course, the "way lower" number of nuclear plants may have something to do with that. But on you also have to consider the lack of evacuations around a coal plant in the event of disasters - and I don't know of a single coal plant that has a sarcophagus over it, or a vast area around it where people are forbidden to live.
And that's where your fantasy diverges from reality - and you don't even realize it. They built that network for *their* purposes, not yours. You forgot that the ground you planted the gardens on wasn't yours in the first place.
Nah it's really just a dud, and worse yet a dud that directly copies XKCD's style without any of his insight or creativity. Dedoimedo is pretty much ready for Hollywood - he's got their modus operandi down cold.
Why would it have to stay there? Does not Japan have waste storage facilities? It's not like the mass cannot be physically removed - they had the same thing at TMI, and though it took a while it was all removed.
But nuclear power plants aren't one of those things - every bit of experience we have to date indicates that they want to be big because it makes so many things easier.
One of the harsh lessons the US Navy learned in the 50's with their attempts to build small nuclear power plants for destroyers and smaller submarines is that the cost and complexity of the reactor scale very weakly (read almost not at all) with the size of the plant. That's why, for the past forty-odd years, seaborne nuclear power has been confined to submarines (where the performance advantage is worth the cost), aircraft carriers (ditto), and cruisers (because it was mandated by Congress).
The problem with any precision engineering is that's it's expensive and difficult to change. Size is utterly irrelevant.
That's the problem - they *did* believe their indications... Most notably the ones that said the PORV was shut (it wasn't) and the secondary coolant pumps were running (they were, but they were isolated preventing the coolant from reaching the reactor).
Actually, they *missed* the one indicating high temperature in the primary relief circuit.
That was the whole reason the accident got so bad - the indications they saw (PORV, secondary coolant pumps) lead them to believe that core water level (which they had no way of measuring) should be going up and the core temperature going down. They couldn't understand why then that the core temperature continued to go up. It wasn't until the next shift arrived and noticed the high temps in the primary relief circuit that the backup to the PORV was shut and water levels and flow through the core was restored. (But by then, it was hours too late. The damage to the core was already done.)
Actually, now that the S5W is out of service, the vast majority of reactors in Naval Service is the S6G - whose basic design dates from the late 60's/early 70's. Right behind them is the A4W - whose design also dates from the late 60's/early 70's.
Not to mention that naval nuclear propulsion plants aren't really related to shore electrical generating plants. Sure, they're both nuclear reactors - but the differ greatly in concept and detail.
Sensationalist horsecrap. Things routinely go wrong with nuclear power plants, and unless you actually follow the NRC bulletins - you'll never know about it because it posed zero risk to anyone.
No offense, but you're delusional. Budgets are set based on the rates approved by the utilities commissions - which aren't going to go up just because the plant is operated by a not-for-profit or a public utility.
Sure, if you define the "right upgrades" as "replacing damn near every component in the system including the boilers, turbines, and generators". Otherwise, not so much. (You're also likely suffering from survivor bias.)
Then why do you and the grandparent insist on treating them as such? If they aren't political activists (or more correctly, terrorists in the normal sense of the word), then they're criminals.
Then why do you go to such lengths to provide excuses and justifications? As above, you're saying one thing and then blithely saying another without the foggiest clue as your inconsistency.
Yet another inconsistency due to utter cluelessness.
In the first place, pirates arise independently where piracy is profitable. Stopping piracy off of Somalia won't make a bunch of fisherman off of Chile (grabbing a country at random) suddenly go "yo! let's all be pirates". In the second place, history has shown again and again that when you make piracy unprofitable and dangerous - it stops.
And unless you've bought into the pirate's propaganda hook, line, and sinker - there doesn't need to be.
Seriously, people interested in taking matters into their own hands and establishing law and order form police forces and coast guards. People interested in taking advantage of the lack of law and order prey on innocents. They sail hundreds and sometimes thousands of miles to take hostages and demand ransoms without speaking a word about fisheries or toxic waste.
Then why did he label so many of them as successes or failures, giving specific reasons why?
He's mostly using "failed" in the conventional marketdroid sense - they didn't fly off the shelves making the corporation manufacturing them and those investing in them buckets of cash.
That's true of many of the items in the collection.
He labels the overblown Swiss Army Knife as a bad design - while failing to consider the purpose of the design. (As a collectible/art piece, which he tacitly admits it was a success at.) The next knife down he's equally dismissive of. But he fails to consider that a) there are other methods of carrying (a belt pouch for example), or b) that there *are* people who constantly have something it will fit into handy (a photographer and his camera bag, a fisherman and his tackle box, etc..). The lowest knife, which he praises, has so little functionality it's only real use is to be impressive to the guy in the next cubicle over because you're the Guy Who Always Has A Knife.
The same with the Nikon Coolpix 100. He seems utterly unaware that there are a huge number of cameras out there... My little Canon A1200 has no extra chargers or cables either.
He praises the Olympic Memory Stick Thumb Drive - but take away the 'cool' packaging, and it's just another thumb drive. Maybe he keeps the 'cool' packaging as an art piece on his desk, but I suspect he's one of the few.
Overall Mr Buxton is really, really bad at evaluating the success or failure and the usefulness or not of many of the items he has in his collection.
And other than political orientation - that's different from Slashdot how? (Yeah, I grant most Slashdotters can actually spell.)
The vast majority of the rail in the country was paid for by private investment, not public. Also, the vast majority of public and private investment in infrastructure occurred in the 20th century, not the 19th.
You've got it quite backwards. Photography is virtually always based on a set price for a package or per item on a menu of choices.
It's not a high margin business, and every hour spent negotiating is an hour spent accumulating costs and not making money.
I'm not complacent - but I'm also not ignorant. Going into space today to escape a dinosaur killer is like walking into an auto body shop to buy a pizza. It's not only pointless, it's stupidly silly - because it's going to be centuries at best before anything off planet has sufficient infrastructure, population, and capital to survive the loss of Earth.
No, the real question is why buzzword filled drivel like yours gets modded insightful. The OP made a valid point - which you failed to address at all.
Jingoism is no substitute to actual thought.
Hogwash. LEO is a physical place just like Manhattan or Des Moines. We know to a fair degree what physically can or cannot be done there - and how much it costs to get there to do what can be done. The calculations to determine if money can be made from those activities, given the known inputs, are something any first year accounting student can do.
Yet despite all the years the input data has been done, and all the years a lot of people have been thinking about the data... the best we've got is blind jingoism. To any rational person that indicates that there is Problem with a capital 'P'.
No, TMI-2 didn't reach cold shutdown until 27 April - nearly a month after the accident.
The sad part is that you actually actually seem to believe anything has changed. The worse part is that there is enough equally deluded moderators to get drivel like yours rated 'insightful'.
Nothing has changed, you're just you've failed to realize the difference between your fantasies and assumptions and reality.
The reality is - it's always been this way. When I was in high school, thirty years ago, cars were a mature technology and most of them could be worked on by practically anyone with a modicum of sense and reasonable eye-hand coordination. Yet very few people did their own work on their own cars. The same goes for practically any piece of technology you care to mention - from as simple as the hot water heater in your dwelling to something as complex as a computer. Most people simply don't care to learn enough to fix/maintain them. They either pay someone else to do the work, or just pay to replace the item. (Depending on the relative costs and the value of the item.)
That's a very noble slogan - but utterly disconnected from reality. These rules are designed to regulate the craft that will fly over existing populated areas, in the atmosphere - *not* in space. I.E. they represent a danger to bystanders in the same way aircraft do.
Historically speaking? It works pretty damm well. Far more colonies were peacefully let go or pulled from the sphere of one country to that of another by violence or it's threat than freed themselves with out without the aid of others. And when we're talking about 'colonies' that for the foreseeable future will be utterly and completely dependent on those imposing the rules...
Even if he wasn't actively commanding - that doesn't mean he wasn't consulting and guiding or being kept in the loop. The courier that turned out to be the key to locating bin Laden almost certainly had to be carrying something worth bin Laden taking the risk of maintaining a communications link considering the measures he took to sever other links.
You're remembering a golden era that never existed. Newspapers have always been biased. Back when all but the smallest towns had more than one paper, you'd have a Democratic paper, a Republican paper, a Reformist paper, etc... etc... (Substitute political parties of your own country to get localized results.)
The Ogle Earth blog has the best coverage I've seen so far - deducing the location from various clues. Finding it turns out to be a medium difficult problem because of the age of the imagery.